Friday, September 28, 2012

It may seem obvious that children
under age ten should not be given alcohol. However, many parents believe that
allowing children to taste alcohol when the adults around them are imbibing
will actually inoculate them from future alcohol abuse. Some version of this
belief was held by up to 40% of parents in a recent study conducted by
Christine Jackson and her colleagues from RTI International the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Over a thousand mother and 3rd
grade child pairs were recruited and interviewed about alcohol use in the home.
Women were asked whether they allowed their own children to sip alcohol and
whether they considered this to be an acceptable practice for all children.
They were also asked whether there should be an age limit for the practice.

Many of the mothers chose to indulge children who requested a sip of alcohol. One of the top reasons given
was the hope that by nonchalantly allowing children to taste alcohol, the drinks
would lose their forbidden fruit appeal. Mothers also cited the expectation
that, upon finding they disliked the taste, their children would choose to forgo
alcohol in the future. Finally, some mothers expressed the belief that by allowing
their children to sip drinks in the home, they were teaching their children how
to be responsible drinkers.

Unfortunately, the drinking behavior of teens, when associating with other
kids, bears little resemblance to the drinking norms practiced in the home. In
fact, previous studies have shown that one of the factors most often associated
with alcohol use by age fourteen is having tasted alcohol before age ten. In
other words, if parents allow their children to sip alcohol in an effort to
stave off underage usage, that intention is likely to backfire.Christine Jackson, Susan Ennett, Denise Dickinson, & Michael Bowling (2012). Letting Children Sip
Understanding Why Parents Allow Alcohol Use by Elementary School–aged Children Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. DOI: 10.1001/archpediatrics.2012.1198.Donovan JE, & Molina BS (2011). Childhood risk factors for early-onset drinking. Journal of studies on alcohol and drugs, 72 (5), 741-51 PMID: 21906502.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Good news and bad news for
people who carry the Huntington’s disease (HD) gene. The good news is that they
apparently can learn more quickly than noncarriers. The bad news is that
they have HD. Okay, I admit
that’s not much of a trade-off. My apologies to anyone suffering from this fatal disease.

HD is caused by a dominant
gene mutation. Thus, if one of your parents has the disease, you have a 50/50
chance of having it yourself. Nowadays, there is a genetic test that can tell
whether a person has the mutation. Needless to say, choosing whether to get
tested for an illness that is both inevitable and incurable is not an easy
decision.

Christian Beste and his colleagues from Ruhr-Universitat
Bochum and Leibniz Research Centre recruited
participants who had made the choice to be tested. The researchers gave
‘pre-manifest’ HD gene mutation carriers (people who were as yet symptom free)
and healthy controls a set of perception tests. The subjects were asked to
detect changes in the brightness of bars on a screen. After the initial test, participants were given the opportunity to passively observe changes in brightness, a training method known to increase visual discrimination, and then retested. HD carriers improved as much with only 20 minutes
of training as controls did after 40 minutes of training.

I’d
like to delve into the world of utter speculation now. One reason that HD is as
common as it is, affecting one of out every 10-20,000 people, is that most
people have already reproduced by the time they realize they have the disease.
Perhaps another reason is that being an HD carrier confers some cognitive advantage during the pre-symptomatic stage. Again, not much comfort to the unfortunates who will succumb to this illness, though this new knowledge may be of some use to people with other kinds of cognitive defects.Christian Beste, Edmund Wascher, Hubert Dinse, & Carsten Saft (2012). Faster Perceptual Learning through Excitotoxic Neurodegeneration Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.08.012

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

While people still debate whether or not viruses can be
considered life forms, some scientists, like University of Illinois researchers Arshan Nasir, Kyung
Mo Kim and Gustavo Caetano-Anolles, propose that viruses get their own cherished spot on the tree of life. According to them, viruses deserve their owndomain along with Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya.

Just as archaeons have a different evolutionary history and
biochemistry than bacteria (leading to them getting their own domain separate from bacteria)
viruses also have a distinct history. In fact, the researchers suggest that
viruses arose from a lineage that predated or coexisted with the earliest
non-viral life forms on Earth. Much of this
conclusion is based on studies of giant viruses. To be fair, not everyone agrees with the methodology used to make the case for a fourth domain. No doubt it will be debated for some time.

So what are giant viruses? As the
name implies, these are extra large viruses that were first discovered two
decades ago. How large? A typical giant virus has a genome with over a million
bases and close to a thousand genes. ‘Regular’ viruses are far smaller. The
influenza virus genome has between 12,000 and 15,000 bases and the HIV virus
genome is less than ten thousand bases long. Meanwhile, one of the smallest
bacteria, Mycoplasma genitalium, has a
genome of less than 600,000 base pairs and only 521 genes. I should point out
that no one disputes that tiny M. genitalium is alive.

Intriguingly, some giant viruses have their ownsatellite virusesthat act like parasites on the larger virus.

If you’re interested, the Giant Virus website maintains a top 100 list with the hundred largest viruses known
to date. Currently holding the top position is Megavirus chilensis with a whopping 1.25 million bases and 1120 genes.

Monday, September 24, 2012

There’s good news and bad news
about brain cancer treatment. The good news is that Fernando Safdie of the
University of Southern California and his colleagues may have found a way to
boost the effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy without damaging healthy
cells. The bad news is that the method involves starvation.

The most common type of brain
cancer is glioma. Treatment usually includes surgery, radiation and
chemotherapy, but even with all that the five-year survival rate is less than
3%. The standard chemotherapy drug for this type of cancer is Temozolomide
(TMZ) but it can only temporarily halt the growth of brain tumors. Meanwhile,
these treatments damage healthy tissue as well as cancerous cells. Obviously, any approach that can improve these odds is worth investigating.

Why pursue fasting as a
treatment? Unlike normal cells, under times of duress, cancer cells don’t transfer scant resources
from growth to maintenance functions. Thus, the tumor cells are particularly
vulnerable to starvation. The researchers hope that fasting can cause these
toxic therapies (chemotherapy and radiotherapy) to preferentially attack tumors rather than healthy tissues.

‘Short-term starvation’ was
tested both in vitro, with glioma
cell cultures, and in mice. In both cases, tumor cells but not normal cells were
sensitized to TMZ. In fact, starvation alone slowed tumor growth as much as
chemotherapy alone, though the greatest benefit was seen with fasting and
chemotherapy. Mice that fasted and got TMZ had the smallest tumors and survived the longest. The same
pattern held for radiotherapy. Mice that had been deprived of food had the best
outcomes.

I’d
like to point out that each enforced fast lasted 48 hours, and the mice
underwent two cycles of fasting during their treatment. In other words, this treatment
will have to have an amazing success rate before any humans are willing to try
it. That doesn’t seem to be the case yet. Although the fasting mice fared
better, all but one eventually succumbed to their tumors. To be fair, the
fasting mice did not appear to suffer from their deprivations. Judging by their activity and general
interest in their surroundings, they felt better than their non-fasting
cohorts, possibly because the chemotherapy was not devastating their healthy
tissues to the same extent. Safdie F, Brandhorst S, Wei M, Wang W, Lee C, Hwang S, Conti PS, Chen TC, & Longo VD (2012). Fasting enhances the response of glioma to chemo- and radiotherapy. PloS one, 7 (9) PMID: 22984531

Friday, September 21, 2012

What do you get when you
combine free and open-source software with 3D printing? Anything you want! Joshua Pearce of Michigan Technological University wrote a piece in Science explaining the wonders of do-it-yourself lab equipment construction.

Michigan Tech's Joshua Pearce with a second-generation, open-source, 3D printer called a Mendel RepRap. The machine is made up of parts available in any local hardware store, open-source electronics available online, and parts that it can make for itself--all the red, white and blue components. Pearce has saved thousands of dollars by building his own lab equipment with this machine and others like it.Credit: Sarah Bird/Michigan Tech.

To make your own lab supplies, the first thing you’ll need is
a 3D printer. As the name implies, this is a device that prints solid objects. Instead of using ink, these printers build up a series of sub-millimeter thick layers of plastic or metal until they create the desired object. Pearce
recommends the RepRap, which is not only under $1000, but can halfway replicate
itself. This means that by adding a few components, you’ll soon have as many
RepRaps as you need. You can see a 3D printer in action below (vastly speeded up):

Next, you’ll need an Arduino.
This is a microcontroller that can run either your 3D printer, or the items you
end up fabricating. There are specific Arduino programs for running
oscilloscopes, ph meters, Geiger counters and even DNA amplifiers. You can pick
up an Arduino for about $30.

Finally, you’ll need to input a design
or blueprint. Luckily, you can find free digital designs for everything from test
tube racks to centrifuge rotors at Thingiverse. Just perusing the examples of things people can fabricate with their 3D printers is fascinating.

Obviously, we have a ways to
go before labs can manufacture everything they need, especially complex or
sensitive electronic machinery. In the meantime, labs with these 3D printers can save money while never running out of pipette tips or Petri dishes again. If you add in the fact that you can modify designs to create precisely what you need, you have a real winner.

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Pre-wedding jitters, sometimes referred to as ‘cold feet’ are not uncommon. On the other hand, they aren’t
universal either. Justin Lavner, Benjamin Karney and Thomas Bradbury from the
University of California, Los Angeles wondered whether these feelings of
anxiety could have any predictive power about the longevity of the ensuing
marriage. For better or worse, women’s negative prenuptial feelings do correlate with a
higher divorce rate.

Both spouses from 232 newlywed
couples were invited to participate in a study. Each couple had been married
for less than six months at the time of recruitment and no one in the study had
been married before or had children. Each person filled out questionnaires and
was interviewed every six months for the next four years.

At the initial interview, each
spouse was asked, “Were you ever uncertain or hesitant about getting
married?” and asked to rate their
engagement period as ‘smooth’ or ‘difficult and turbulent’. In subsequent interviews,
subjects were asked to rate their marital satisfaction.

Overall, 47% of husbands and 38% of wives had had some
hesitancy or uncertainty about getting married. Premarital doubts did not
correlate with age, income, education, premarital cohabitation, length of
pre-marriage relationship or parental divorce. For men only, uncertainty did go
along with having a higher level of neuroticism.

By the end of the four-year study, 27 couples had divorced.
Whether or not men had entered a marriage with trepidation did not predict
whether the couple would soon divorce. On the other hand, women who had had
cold feet were two and a half times more likely to end the marriage than women
who had not had any doubts.

I have
a couple of comments about this. First, even though more than a third of women
had pre-wedding jitters, only 11% of the couples went on to divorce. Clearly,
having cold feet need not spell doom for a marriage. Also, this study does not
address the nature of the doubts. Do worries about raising future children
together spell doom more often than commitment fears? Finally,
four years is a pretty short time frame in which to assess a marriage. I’d be
interested to know how many marriages that began with at least one partner
feeling some doubts survived to celebrate a 25th anniversary. Justin Lavner, Benjamin Karney, & Thomas Bradbury (2012). Do Cold Feet Warn of Trouble Ahead? Premarital
Uncertainty and Four-Year Marital Outcomes Journal of Family Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0029912

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Planarians have an incredible ability to regenerate, even when chopped in pieces. A word of warning, if you don't speak Japanese, and maybe even if you do, you may want to watch this with the sound off.

By the way, if anyone can provide an English translation for this clip, please send it to me.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Sharon Curhan of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston and her
colleagues tested whether common over-the-counter analgesics can increase the
risk of hearing loss. Unfortunately, they found that they do.

The scientists conducted two studies, an older study of men
and a newer study including only women. In each study, some tens of thousands
of adults were followed for over two decades. Participants filled out
questionnaires every two years detailing their use of three categories of pain
medicines (ibuprofen, acetaminophen and aspirin) and any onset of hearing loss.

For men, the overall risk of developing hearing loss increased
significantly if they were frequent analgesic users. The risk was the greatest
for men under fifty years old. For them, taking ibuprofen two or more times per
week increased their risk of hearing loss by 61% percent, and taking
acetaminophen increased it by 99%! Aspirin usage led to a 33% higher risk of
hearing loss in men under 50.

The picture for women was similar, if not so severe. Again,
younger women were hit the hardest. Overall, women had a 17% greater risk of
hearing loss if they used ibuprofen at least twice a week, and a 9% greater
risk with acetaminophen. Interestingly, women who used acetaminophen more than
five times a week had a slightly lower risk than those who used it four or five
times per week (11% versus 21%). The authors aren’t sure what to make of this,
and neither am I. It almost seems as if once you’ve hit your fifth dose of the
week, you should make it a clean sweep.

How about aspirin? Unlike for men, taking aspirin had no
significant effect on women’s hearing. This was true for both low-dose and
regular dose aspirin. Again, it’s unclear why there should be this difference
between the sexes. However, of the categories of pain killers studied, aspirin
had the least effect in men, and all the analgesics had a smaller effect on
women than men. Perhaps in women, the effect of taking aspirin is simply below
the threshold of detection in this study.

There
are a couple of possible mechanisms for how these medicines could affect
hearing. They may reduce cochlear blood flow and/or they may reduce the level
of chemicals that protect the cochlea from noise-induced damage. They may also
induce damage in the hair cells within the ear.Men: Sharon Curhan, Roland Eavey, Josef Shargorodsky, & Gary Curhan (2010). Analgesic Use and the Risk of Hearing Loss in Men American Journal of Medicine DOI: 10.1016/j.amjmed.2009.08.006Women: Sharon Curhan, Josep Shargorodsky, Roland Eavey, & Gary Curhan (2012). Analgesic Use and the Risk of Hearing Loss in Women American Journal of Epidemiology DOI: 10.1093/aje/kws146

Monday, September 17, 2012

Once in a while, the
conventional wisdom about an illness turns out to be correct. Remember hearing
that you’re most contagious before you start showing symptoms? Well, if that
illness is the flu and you’re a ferret, that’s absolutely true.

Doctors aren’t blind to the
possibility that pre or asymptomatic people could be spreading disease. In
fact, epidemiologists often assume that up to a third of disease transmissions
originate in people with no obvious signs of illness. Kim Roberts and her
colleagues from Imperial College London used ferrets to test whether this was so. Apparently, ferrets make good flu-patient models. They become feverish and
sneezy just like we do.

First, the researchers
determined how quickly symptoms appeared during a normal bout of flu. They
infected some unfortunate ferrets (donors) and monitored their temperatures and
how much virus they shed in their nasal secretions over the next ten days. The
peak for both virus and fever was on day two, with a secondary spike of viral
secretions on day five. Ferrets stopped secreting virus on day seven. Fever was
the earliest sign of illness and appeared between 38 and 45 hours post
infection.

Next, the scientists conducted
a series of experiments where they exposed healthy ferrets (sentinels) to the
sick ones at various times. Sentinels that were housed with the sick donors
from 16 to 20 hours post infection did not become infected, but ferrets that
were placed with sick roommates from 24 to 28 hours post infection did become
ill. Remember, this was at least ten hours before the earliest sign of disease
appeared in the donors.

What about aerosol
transmissions? The authors infected another set of ferrets and placed new
sentinels in adjacent cages from either day 1 to 2 or day 5 to 6 post
infection. Only the former group of sentinels became infected despite the fact
that far more sneezing and coughing was going on during the latter time period.

Clearly, the sentinel ferrets
were becoming infected before any outward sign of flu appeared in their fellows. If this
translates to human epidemiology, it could be bad news for trying to contain a
future pandemic. However, I want to point out a couple of caveats. For one
thing, this was an extremely small study. Each phase included no more than four
animals. And second, although the donors may have shown no demonstrable sign of
flu (fever, coughing, etc), during the early infectious period, it’s impossible
to know whether they felt completely well. If humans feel a bit ‘under the
weather’ before any overt flu symptoms appear, they might take greater pains to
avoid infecting other people.

Friday, September 14, 2012

Does it serve a restaurant’s
interests more to have soft music and lighting, or bright lights and loud music?
People do eat faster in the more harsh conditions present in most fast food
places, but do they also eat more and/or spend more?

Brian Wansink of Cornell
University and Koert van Ittersum from the Georgia Institute of Technology used
soundproof wall dividers, candles and soft jazz to transform part of a Hardee’s fast food restaurant into a fine dining experience. The rest of the restaurant
maintained its usual décor (bright colors and loud music). Customers were
randomly seated in one of the two sections. Unbeknownst to them, not only was
their table time clocked, but their leftovers were weighed to calculate how
many calories they had consumed. They were also asked to rate their dining
experience.

Both groups ordered the same
amount of food, and thus spent the same amount of money. Not surprisingly, the
people in the fine dining section stayed a bit longer than those in the fast
food section. Despite this, the fine dining patrons actually ate less than their fast
food cohorts, mainly because they left more food on their plates. I’d suggest
that lingering too long over a fast food meal makes you lose your appetite,
except that this group also rated the experience and the food higher, even
though it was the exact same food.

Softer music and lighting
sounds like a win for the customers, who consumed fewer calories and enjoyed
the meal more. Meanwhile, the restaurant didn’t lose anything in this scenario,
since people spent the same amount of money.

I actually think the benefit
is greater than that shown in this study. Because all the test subjects entered the
Hardee’s anticipating a fast food meal, they only stayed 4.7% longer in the
fine dining area than in the fast food area. If you assume that the average person eats a fast food meal
in under fifteen minutes, that translates to less than a minute longer. Not really long
enough to order dessert. In a real sit down restaurant, the difference between a jarring, unpleasant ambiance and one where you can comfortably hear your
tablemates may very well translate into higher expenditure.

That
said, if a restaurant relies heavily on rapid turn-over, they should probably
stick to bright lights and loud music.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

A huge international project
called the ‘Encyclopedia of DNA Elements’ (ENCODE) is now ready for prime time.
This week, some thirty papers have been published explaining what it is and
what it might mean. For a far more comprehensive discussion than I can give
here, you can’t go wrong with Ed Yong’s tour de force at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

In a nutshell, ENCODE is an
enormous manual for the human genome. Now that we’ve sequenced all those
stretches of Gs, Ts, As and Cs, what exactly are they doing? The ENCODE analyses are as
interesting for what they disprove as they are for what they demonstrate.

For example, have you heard
that over 95% of the human genome is ‘junk DNA’, not really of any use to us?
Wrong! It turns out that nearly every part of our genomes might serve some function. That doesn’t mean the number of genes was grossly underestimated. We
still think that only a few percent of our DNA codes for proteins. It’s
just that lots of non-coding sections of DNA are used either to make regulatory
RNAs, or simply as landing zones
for RNAs and proteins.

Another thing ENCODE tackles
is the problem of how and why our myriad cell types differ from each other.
You’re not going to get very far in figuring out why we aren’t chimps if you
can’t even say why we aren’t just giant livers rather than being composed of more than
a thousand distinct cell types.

For a summary from some of the
lead researchers, see below:

And for a more visual
explanation, leave it to Ian Sample of The Guardian:

Obviously,
much more data is going to come out of this immense collaboration. In the
meantime, you can look over the results yourself at the ENCODE website.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

This sort of twisting motion is called 'nutation'. It's not well understood, although it does rely on unequal growth rates on different sides of the plant tissue. These images were taken at 10 minute intervals.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

It’s not enough anymore to
simply announce the finding of a new exoplanet. We’ve found so many in the past
few years (thousands to date) that they’re almost commonplace. Now, the new planets
have to have something unusual about them to make them noteworthy. Case in point,
a pair of planets orbiting the binary star system Kepler-47.

Circumbinary (orbiting two
stars rather than just one) planets have been discovered before. However, this
time, it’s a whole star system going around the pair of stars. Granted, that
system only has two known stars, but more may yet be found.

The planets were discovered by
Jerome Orosz of San Diego State University and more than three dozen
collaborators who shared authorship. They had to observe the two stars
eclipsing each other, as well as the planets transitting (passing in front of)
the stars. Each of these events had to be observed multiple times in order to
confirm the data. Luckily, the two stars orbit each other every seven and a
half days and the inner planet orbits both stars in just under 50 days. Thus, it
didn’t take that long to see several transits. At a little over 300 days, the
outer planet has a year almost as long as ours. Cosmologists have only observed
three transits of this planet.

An artist's depiction of the Kepler-47 system. Kepler-47c is the large planet on the left; Kepler

47-b appears as the small blue crescent to the right of the two stars.

Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle.

What about habitability? Although one of the stars is similar in size to that of our sun (the other is about a
third as big), neither of the planets is expected to be Earth-like. While
the outer planet does technically reside in the habitable (liquid water zone),
it’s about four and a half times as big as the Earth. The inner planet is also
three times the size of the Earth and not even in the habitable zone.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Species are going extinct at a prodigious rate, often
because their habitats have been eradicated by human encroachment. Tigers are a
prime example of a creature not expected to last into the next century. But
that needn’t be the case. Neil Carter from Michigan State University and his
colleagues have found that humans and tigers can coexist successfully.

First, let’s be clear about what’s being discussed. No one
is suggesting that tigers and humans can happily occupy the same suburban
neighborhoods. This study simply shows that human usage of a specific site in a
forest does not prevent tigers from using that same site at a later time. In
other words, the activities of humans need not drive tigers out of an area.

The study was conducted in and
around Nepal’s Chitwan National Park. This region is home to over 25 breeding
female tigers and is also visited regularly both by tourists and researchers
and by local residents collecting forest resources such as firewood (though the
latter operate outside the park boundaries).

The scientists found that over a two-year period, both
people and tigers were using the same locations of the forest, as evidenced by
camera traps. Even in areas of high human usage (both walking and driving),
tigers were still observed. In fact, increasing human usage did not affect
tiger density. The main concession the tigers seemed to make was to occupy the
territory at night, leaving it to the humans during the daytime.

While
this is somewhat encouraging, I think it will do little to prevent the eventual
extinction of tigers or any other animals. It’s great that tigers don’t mind
sharing their territories with humans, but I’m pretty sure most humans do mind
sharing their territories with tigers. Carter NH, Shrestha BK, Karki JB, Pradhan NM, & Liu J (2012). Coexistence between wildlife and humans at fine spatial scales. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 22949642

Friday, September 7, 2012

Close to 90% of Neandethals were
right-handed. Much of this data comes from comparing the muscularity of their arms, which show clear differences. However, arms aren’t the only way you can
tell a lefty from a righty. You can also look at that individual’s teeth.

How often have you used your teeth
as a tool to hold, pull or tear something? Neanderthals, with their much
stronger jaws, presumably made even more use of their teeth. Wear patterns on
their enamel confirm this. A right-handed person who routinely uses his mouth
as a vise grip will not wear down the same sides of his teeth as a left-handed
person. You can try this yourself (though hopefully not to the point of damaging
your enamel). Thus, by looking at the scratches on fossilized teeth, you can
tell whether that individual was right or left-handed.

Virginie Volpato of the Senckenberg
Research Institute Frankfurt and her colleagues
examined the teeth and skeleton of one particular Neanderthal specimen (Regourdou
1). They found that using his teeth to determine his handedness yielded the
same result as using his arm asymmetry. This strengthens the idea that you can
distinguish right from left-handed Neanderthals and also confirms that most of
them were in fact righties.

I think the authors go a bit off the rails with their suggestion that
the preponderance of right-handedness amongst the Neanderthals indicates that
they had language (which is predominantly a function of the left brain). I don’t
doubt that Neanderthals did have language, but this seems like a tenuous
connection. For one thing, couldn’t there be some other reason most Neanderthals
are right-handed? And for another, left-handed people also have language.
Perhaps someone with more training in neurology and/or paleontology could set
me straight.Virginie Volpato, Roberto Macchiarelli, Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg, Ivana Fiore, Luca Bondioli, & David W. Frayer (2012). Hand to Mouth in a Neandertal: Right-Handedness in Regourdou 1 PLoS ONE DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0043949.g004

Stochastic Scientist? What's up with that?

Why the Stochastic Scientist? As I'm sure you all know, 'stochastic' is another word for 'random', which is what I intend for the focus of this blog. Although my formal training is as a molecular biologist, there are many other fields of science that are also fascinating and beautiful. It's my intention to blog about which ever scientific discovery or invention catches my, and hopefully your, fancy.

I also hope to inspire people to learn more about science. By choosing among a huge variety of scientific endeavors, I'll undoubtably hit upon something that will pique my readers' interest.

I guess I could have called my blog 'The Joy of Science', but that wouldn't have been quite so random.